Cole Allen did not arrive at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner by accident. He had been brainwashed to believe that the nation was in mortal danger from the elected president, Donald Trump, and the only way to save America and save the people was to murder him.
“And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” Allen wrote in his manifesto. “I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit), but I really hope it doesn’t come to that,” he added.
Leftists, take note: Allen would have murdered a lot of left-wing media just to take out Trump, so maybe he’s not such a big hero after all.
But Allen was a product of the current political climate. Douglas Murray, writing in The Free Press, notes that “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” was what the crowd of protesters was screaming at attendees entering the Washington Hilton.
“Free speech is often ugly, and curtailing it is uglier still. But it struck me how aligned the manifesto is with certain fringes, on both the right and left,” Murray writes. “And the fact that people screamed at journalists about baby killers and child rapists for the crime of attending a dinner with a president—who is neither of those things—shows how normalized this ugly discourse has become.”
Any objective observer who has been following politics and political discourse over the last decade knows that the ugliest of “ugly discourse” comes from the left and that the hysterical rhetoric from the top leaders of the Democratic Party, down to the lowliest leftist internet ruffian, has all but guaranteed that someone like Cole Allen would try to kill the object of such hate and loathing. And the odds are frightfully good that someone else will also make an attempt on Trump’s life before he leaves office.
There’s a famous academic ethical exercise that poses the question: Would you go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler? “Once you accept that Trump is Hitler, then that fantasy of going back in time and killing Hitler isn’t a fantasy anymore,” Murray writes. “It becomes something you can do in the here and now.”
Even after Saturday night’s shooting, people were still outside the dinner, screaming at police. One person held a sign saying “Death to tyrants. Death to them all.” This is protected speech, and it should be. But there should be a basic civic standard by which someone who stands on a corner screaming that the president is a child-raping murderer is laughed off.
Instead, it’s all become very normal.
I wrote a column last Thursday about the New York Times podcast that debated whether Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson—a 50-year-old father of two—was justified. The guests accused Thompson of “social murder” while failing to condemn his actual murder. It was the same moral inversion we saw after Charlie Kirk’s killing, when too many people valorized the shooter, and came up with wicked conspiracy theories about the crime itself.
Again, this is protected speech. But it has consequences. Both cases are coming up for trial. And there has been so much wicked disinformation, lies, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories in both that it’s perfectly possible that there could be a mistrial, or that the verdict changes because one juror absorbed some of the craziest nonsense.
Allen didn’t hear voices telling him to kill Trump. Instead, he shared a hallucination with millions of Americans who believe that Trump was a client of Jeffrey Epstein and raped underage girls, that he was a spy for the Russians and betrayed the U.S., and that he was complicit in Israel’s “genocide” that wasn’t. That millions of people believe all of that only reinforces Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “The medium is the message.”
Not the “message” is “content.” If the medium (social media) is designed to maximize engagement through outrage, then the “message” received by those on the left is often a heightened, hyper-antagonistic version of Trump. Drawing a stick figure is far easier than painting a portrait.
Digital media favors short, punchy clips over long-form nuance. A TikTok video says more in 30 seconds than a 10,000-word magazine article. That’s the “medium” driving our politics, and it’s doing enormous damage to the body politic.
We will adapt. It’s in our nature. But what the U.S. will look like in ten years, I wouldn’t want to live there.
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